Winners and losers Berne came to believe that "from earliest months, the child is taught not only what to do, but also what to see, hear, touch, think, and feel....each person obediently ends up at the age of five or six with a script of life plan largely dictated by his parents. It tells him how he's going to carry on his life, and how it's going to end, winner, non-winner, or loser". That is, the child is given information both about themselves and also about the external world (which may be factually correct or incorrect) by the parent concomitant with which the child is encouraged by the parent to use this information in order to decide how to live. For Berne, "a winner is defined as a person who fulfills his contract with the world and with himself", and the object of psychotherapy was to "break up scripts and make losers into non-winners ('Making progress') and non-winners into winners ('Getting well', 'Flipping in', and 'Seeing the light')". In the first flush of enthusiasm for script analysis, proponents would proudly proclaim that "my experience is that most people with a loser's script can change this to a winner's script during the process of therapy". Later practitioners would more cautiously observe that "'script cure'...is seldom a once-for-all event. Much more often, cure is a matter of progressively learning to exercise new choices". Psychology of human destiny Drawing on the work of Freud, Jung, and Joseph Campbell, in The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Berne argued that fairy-tales, legends, mythology and drama were the early tools for mankind "to distill out and record the more homely and recognizable patterns of human living" - and that they still provide keys to the framework of the contemporary life script. Berne made "script analysis...a central theme of his last book", subtitled The Psychology of Human Destiny, in which he explained that "one object of script analysis is to fit the patient's life plan into the grand historical psychology of the whole human race". According to Berne, not only is there an individual script but there is also a family, community and national script. Ultimately there is a script for mankind which determines the fate of the human race. Linking the script to the repetition compulsion, Berne concluded that "script analysis is then the answer to the problem of human destiny, and tells us that our